This is Down Tools Week at Redgate Software, and I’m visiting the office. I had hoped to dive into a team and participate, but scheduling and other commitments mean that I’m only working with a team part of the time.

We had our first standup yesterday. They tried desperately to clip me out of the picture here.

After some morning setup, we walked down to the atrium and gathered in a group, talking about our plans and the work for the afternoon.

We’re using a kanban board, which will live on the glass wall of our conference room. One of the team is “Doing” work on the “doing” part of the wall, filling in the letters. I don’t see a post-it in the “ToDo” section, so we’re already off track. Hopefully when he gets to “Done”, we’ll get a ticket in that column.

We have a number of people working full time this week on a few items, with support from other teams that we’ll need API help from. The developers are pair programming, in 3 groups, with really three goals for the team. They are thinking to switch a few times so that each group gets to work on each part of our project.

Breaks are frequent since the coffee machine is downstairs.

We have a couple of people helping to coordinate and keep things on track, and luckily we got the conference room with the couches.

I’ve been in and out, helping work on the presentation that we’ll give on Friday. Hopefully we’ll have some real, tangible results to show as well as a talk. So far things look good, with lots of progress on the first integration point with another product.